Sunday, 7.12.2020
SAN FRANCISCO AT A CROSSROADS — ALTERED BY PANDEMIC AND PROTEST A SPECIAL REPORT BY CULTURE DESK WEEK ONE: THE CITY
The Throughline is your portal to tomorrow, a view of the Bay Area at the intersection of reality and possibility. Our nine-week journey begins today with a new vision for San Francisco:
1 The open-air office of the future 1 12 steps to a car-free city 1 Greening the Tenderloin Find more inside.
J2 | Sunday, July 12, 2020 | SFChronicle.com
SFChronicle.com | Sunday, July 12, 2020 |
THE CITY
Throughline is a Culture Desk limited-series project exploring what the Bay Area of the near future could look like after the effects of the pandemic and protests take hold. How could we use this moment to reshape our region for the better? On the cover: Check back each week as we reveal another portion of visual development artist Pong Lertsachanant’s rendering of the future of the Bay Area.
JOIN US Meet the future of activism. Columnist Otis R. Taylor Jr. hosts a Zoom chat with youth leaders of recent protests Wednesday, July 15, at 4 p.m. Register at sfchronicle.com/ membership.
STAFF Throughline Editors Sarah Feldberg Robert Morast Designer Alex K. Fong Deputy Photo Director Russell Yip Creative Director Danielle Mollette-Parks Copy Editor Caroline Grannan Managing Editor, Features Michael Gray
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The Chronicle photo illustration
By Sam Whiting
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Futureforms
Jason Kelly Johnson is from Swift Current, Saskatchewan, on the Canadian prairie, population 16,000. Nataly Gattegno hails from Athens, one of the densest cities on Earth, population 3 million. They met in the middle, at the graduate school of architecture at Princeton University, in New Jersey, and came west to open a design firm called Future Cities Lab.
They were far thinkers, except on the name Future Cities. The couple, who live in the Dogpatch with their two daughters, forgot to trademark it and lost it, so now they gather their ideas under the umbrella of Futureforms, an art, design and urban-design studio with a name they did not forget to trademark. One of the first projects at Future Cities was to figure out what the office tower should look like as the urban landscape evolves. Their concept is called Supergalaxy, a windowless and wall-less live/work environment. They tested it by creating a mock-up of the Crown Zellerbach Building, a 20-story tower on Market Street in downtown San Francisco also known as One Bush Plaza. Then they just had to sit back and wait for the design world to catch up, which it did 15 years later with the arrival of the coronavirus, social distancing and the need to rethink how our work spaces are conceived. Q: Was it a long wait, those 15 years it took for the Supergalaxy concept to come around? Gattegno: At the time, it was for an architectural competition, and competitions are usually for speculating with far-out or experimental ideas. We were like, “Oh, wouldn’t it be interesting?” and now it is, “You know what, Supergalaxy is starting to make sense now.” When people are told, “You can work at home now,” it raises the question of what happens to the office space that is left behind. Johnson: Because of COVID-19, people are looking at the business model of having 100 people on a floor working side by side. Supergalaxy is interested in recasting three floors of an entire office building as a hybrid outdoor live/work room, with 30-foot ceilings. Q: How can we grasp that environment? Johnson: We are pulling out all of the existing infrastrucure and furnishings. All that is left is the elevator, stairs and columns. We take out the windows so birds can fly through. There are things within Supergalaxy that blur the distinction between work and play, and between the natural world and the artificial. The ceiling is made of baffles that can lower to protect the space from the wind. It acts as a cocoon around you, but there are moments when fog and wind is allowed into it. You embrace the fact that you might have to wear a fleece or something. Q: Didn’t the ancient Greeks already have this figured out? Gattegno: The one thing that I have taken from my experience in Greece is the importance of outdoor public space. The idea of Supergalaxy is to bring outdoor public space inside a building. That is a more interesting way of rethinking a typical space where you have an agora, which is the Greek word for public space. If you have to stand
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Out with these old maps and transportation proposals …
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ABOUT THIS SECTION
DESIGN TA L K : O P E N -A I R W O R KS PAC E S I N A TO W E R
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Futureforms founding design partners Jason Kelly Johnson and Nataly Gattegno have conceived a mock-up that makes several floors of San Francisco’s 20-story Crown Zellerbach Building (top) completely open-air, as a windowless and wall-less live/work environment. They created the concept 15 years ago — and the radical design ideas are suddenly relevant.
30 feet from someone, you need a big plaza. It doesn’t have to be the plaza in front of City Hall. It can be going down three floors from your office and having a fully outdoor space on the 25th floor. Or an elevated park like at the Transbay Terminal. You are lifted up off the ground and can look into offices and apartments. Johnson: There is this idea that if the typical downtown urban building as we have conceived it becomes obsolete, there is an opportunity to introduce alternate forms of occupation. We could take ideas from the Greek Forum and create open spaces that are conducive to debate and discussion, available to all citizens. Q: The Greeks didn’t need all of these zoning laws, did they? Johnson: The Greeks liked to use the sidewalk and the water’s edge to stand and socialize, debate and discuss, which is what we are doing now, with social distancing. Gattegno: The city would have more unexpected, diverse and potentially productive collisions between programs: Single-family homes adjacent to skyscrapers, public parks in the middle of office towers. Q: What should be public and what should be private? Gattegno: That is one of the things that has been interesting with downtown San Francisco, the amount of privately owned public space. Supergalaxy brings up those questions of public and private. Is that three-story swath public space, like an extension of the sidewalk? Or is it private space owned by the building tenants? Jason and I would argue that it should be an extension of the sidewalk rather than privately owned. Q: Is the Supergalaxy floor plan feasible? Johnson: Businesses right now are completely rethinking their relationship to their staff. Companies are going to try to bring together people for short intensive periods, safely. It is a little like going on a retreat. It will recast office spaces as a living room. You will bring in 10% of your work force, then move them back to their home office. You will clean the space and have another group back in. What Supergalaxy does is to provide an open space that is highly technologically mediated, and allows for fluid communication. Q: What should the future city take away from the coronavirus lockdown? Johnson: People want more space. They want the street to be the sidewalk. There are some interesting patterns emerging with how we are re-occupying space between buildings. People are moving toward the edges and are attracted to places that have light and air and space. We are still attracted to being in the proximity of other people. We still want to look people in the eye while somehow responsibly congregating. A lot of people are imagining a 10-foot bubble around themselves.
Sam Whiting is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: swhiting@sfchronicle.com. Twitter: @samwhitingsf
for your independence
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BACK TO THE D RAW I N G B OA R D : RETHINKING THE C I T Y ’ S ST R E E T S By Peter Hartlaub
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“Give me a tunnel-boring machine, and I’ll solve a lot of problems in this city.” ¶ The first time I saw Twitter personality Burrito Justice type this on the social media platform, way back in 2012, I thought it was science fiction. The pro-bicycle, pro-transit advocate, real name John Oram, once mapped out a system of gondolas connecting the hills of San Francisco. It was an entertaining distraction to stoke our imaginations, while real life featured glacial changes toward a pedestrian-friendly, bike-friendly city.
Leap forward to 2020, and we’re in the middle of a pandemic that looks to be the largest single city-reshaping event since the 1906 earthquake and fires; San Francisco is becoming bikeable and walkable by necessity, adapting and improvising at incredible speeds — with bureaucracy no longer an insurmountable roadblock to change. Since the March 16 Bay Area shelter-inplace order, we’ve seen a car-free wand waved at JFK Drive, Twin Peaks and the Great Highway along Ocean Beach; the addition of 34 lane miles of Slow Streets; a golf course turned into a park; and now parking spots conscripted into restaurant patios. (Car-free
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Market Street happened before COVID-19 raged through the U.S.) Most of these changes had been debated for years and remained out of reach. As the pandemic forced us to reconsider the space around us and how we interact in a dense environment, all these changes have enjoyed a close-to-seamless transition, with rave reviews. With cars returning, potentially in much greater numbers because of the fears and elevated pandemic risk associated with crowded BART and Muni options, residents will have to make a choice. San Franciscans can join cities including Lisbon, Oslo, Seattle and Paris that are focusing on imminent health
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and social equality needs, radically de-escalating vehicle infrastructure, and building bikefirst, walk-first city centers and neighborhoods. Or they can return to a city where personal car needs drive decision-making. History says crisis yields opportunity in the Bay Area. The 1990s demolition of the double-decker Embarcadero Freeway monstrosity, a move that rescued the waterfront, happened only because of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. Our beloved local farmers’ markets started with a food distribution crisis during World War II. So the question now is, how far can this revolution go? (While this exercise doesn’t grapple with the future of the bus system and its current existential crossroads, the Central Subway and BART were included.) “What this moment has taught me is that when circumstances are perceived as being urgent, and our decision makers and elected officials feel like it’s life-and-death stakes, then we can take action and we can be bold,” said SF Bicycle Coalition executive director Brian Wiedenmeier. So let’s agree that nothing is off the table. Even tunnel-boring machines. Below is a 12-step plan — with input from both pragmatists and dreamers — to make San Francisco the bike and pedestrian utopia that suddenly seems within reach. Streets continues on J4
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THE CITY
ONLINE Jay Beaman has spent his pandemic downtime fixing bikes. He doesn’t charge for the service, Beaman just wants more people pedaling in SF. Read the story at sfchronicle.com/throughline.
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… and in with a new car-free San Francisco — if these 12 steps are implemented.
Our recent past is filled with construction boondoggles: the late, expensive and leaky eastern span of the Bay Bridge, the brokenon-arrival new Transbay Terminal and the three-years-late Central Subway. Faith is required to dream of a second BART tube that isn’t mired in similar disappointment, but there’s precedent. The pre-1906 earthquake San Francisco city government was one of the most corrupt in history, building an earlier City Hall so kickback-ridden and faulty that the quake revealed literal garbage had been used to fill the walls. A group of business leaders banded together and helped steer a reinvented San Francisco that was better than before. Add to the fact that this was considered a foregone conclusion even before the pandemic, and a new transbay rail crossing doesn’t seem like such a long shot, doubling our rail capacity across the bay and easing pressure on existing Market Street stations, while giving new neighborhoods access to transit. Who doesn’t want that?
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Jay Beaman was a wine director and manager at Firefly before the pandemic, and he hopes to return to that life in the years to come. Right now, he’s using his unemployment to build a pro-bike army, establishing Scenic Routes Community Bicycle Center, filling his Western Addition living room with parts and tools, and fixing bikes for free. He’s put 25 friends and strangers back on the road, some on bikes that hadn’t been ridden in more than a decade. “It just kind of felt cool to think, ‘OK, this is what I do now. I fix bikes,’ ” he said. The first test of the army’s strength will be enshrining car-free JFK Drive and the use of the Great Highway for pedestrians and bikers. The debate to keep JFK Drive carfree permanently has been going on for a half century, with a motley crew of advocates fighting against well-moneyed museum boosters and other old-guard San Franciscans. The Great Highway seemingly came out of nowhere. Both changes have proven that their utility trumps any inconvenience. If the car-embracing forces win on these two points, then we’re clearly not in a revolution. Biketopia S.F. is over before it started.
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Difficulty gauge: Easy/ Challenging Impact: Limited When columnist Heather Knight and I rebooted the outdated 49 Mile Scenic Drive as a more walk-friendly, bike-friendly route, we both wanted to remove Twin Peaks from the map. In a social media mutiny, Chronicle readers overruled us, claiming the landmark’s vistas overcome its poor pedestrian and bike access. Now it’s the best of all worlds, closed to cars and a sort of Mount Everest for bikers, walkers and runners seeking the best combination of exercise and beauty in the city. Twin Peaks will test the creativity of city leaders, who must ensure that when the pandemic is over, everyone has access to the view. Whether it’s a system of shuttles, disabled parking at Christmas Tree Point or something more inventive (a tourist-friendly weekend Muni line like the 76x Marin Headlands?), the future of Twin Peaks should take personal vehicles out of the pole position.
3 Bring back Presidio People’s Park Difficulty gauge: Easy/ Challenging Impact: Limited For a few lovely weeks this spring, the Presidio Trust opened up the publicly owned 150acre Presidio Golf Course to the proletariat, and a green space used by a small fraction of the population was enjoyed by the masses. The Presidio Trust is weathering tough times, and the revenue they receive annually from the golf course (about $9 million) is one of the few stable parts of their budget. So let’s start small, dedicating one
Todd Trumbull / The Chronicle
Sunday a month for the people, with hopes of expanding Presidio People’s Park to every Sunday when times are better.
network, until San Francisco becomes a city where a pedestrian can safely walk down the middle of the street from one end to the other.
4 Slow Streets continue, and expand
5 Daylighting, raised crosswalks and no right turns on red
Difficulty gauge: Challenging Impact: Considerable Cyril Magnin and Marvin Lewis, two 20th century city leaders who helped shape San Francisco, used to take a daily morning walk together from their Sea Cliff homes to their Financial District offices. Lewis is the father of BART. Magnin’s philanthropy changed the city’s art scene. How many of their best ideas came walking and talking as they crossed the city every day? During the coronavirus, the SFMTA-supported Slow Streets program has limited car access on 30-plus miles of residential roads, creating a safe network for exercise and families to play. SFMTA director Jeffrey Tumlin recently reported that the Slow Streets are receiving 95% support. (“The complaints are about, ‘Why haven’t you done this in my neighborhood yet?’ ”) Paris, Milan and Seattle have all committed to making many of their pandemic traffic changes permanent. San Francisco leaders should keep experimenting, making some forever Slow Streets and building a
Difficulty gauge: Very Challenging Impact: Considerable Imagine a tragedy that happened every year at the Fillmore Auditorium. Every fan was injured, every band member died and every employee at the Fillmore that night was critically injured. That’s the situation in San Francisco, where, four years after Vision Zero SF was adopted to eliminate traffic fatalities, more than 3,000 people were injured and 29 died in motor vehicle incidents last year. The safety measures listed here are not very sexy, but could collectively make a huge difference. Daylighting, already approved by the city but not completed, opens up parking spaces near intersections, so drivers and pedestrians have better visibility. Banning right turns on red lights and raising crosswalks with visible painting will also make intersections safer. Walk SF executive director Jodie Medeiros points out that the Tenderloin, home to some of the most dangerous streets in San Francisco
and the city’s most vulnerable populations, continues to prioritize fast lanes for commuters traveling from the western neighborhoods to the Financial District. “Long term, we can’t forget that every single street on the Tenderloin is part of the high-injury network,” Medeiros said. “We cannot forget that 30 people die a year in traffic violence.”
6 13 mph timed traffic lights Difficulty gauge: Challenging Impact: Considerable I remember the first time I biked down the Folsom “Green Wave.” It was the moment I turned from being “someone who bikes” to viewing biking as a permanent lifestyle. Having traffic lights timed to a bike-friendly 11, 12 or 13 mph on main thoroughfares through residential districts helps to give cars and bikes a more peaceful relationship; less like predator and prey, and more like a dolphin and whale, using the same current to get where they need to go. Tenderloin streets, including Eddy and Ellis, should be added to the Green Wave as a matter of life and death. The use of 13 mph limits should be prioritized wherever bikes and cars share the road.
7 Chase Center 8 to 80 rule Difficulty gauge: Very challenging Impact: Significant When Chase Center opened on Sept. 6, 2019, to the power chords of Metallica and the San Francisco Symphony, the new arena became one of the most bike-friendly sports cathedrals in history, with Terry Francois Boulevard including a two-way bike lane that loops to the front of the arena like a green welcome mat, and valet parking for 300 bicycles. The rest of the city is way behind. A trip from the nearby Bayview to the Golden State Warriors’ home is a harrowing experience, all but forcing bicyclists to risk their lives on Third Street. Neighborhoods including the Ingleside have no clear bike-first channel. The so-called hairball, where the bike lane on Cesar Chavez Street ends at a web of freeway off-ramps and broken street lights, is derided by all who endure it. “I think Jeffrey Tumlin and Mayor (London) Breed should have to ride from the Mission to Bayview on a bike every single day until they fix that hairball,” bike advocate Jay Beaman said. “It’s so unbelievably unsafe.” In our transit utopia, everyone in San Francisco ages 8 to 80 should feel safe making that trip to Chase Center on foot or by bike, whether it’s a fan living in housing near Hunt-
ers Point, a retiree working as an usher who lives in the Sunset or Warriors coach Steve Kerr coming from his house in Presidio Heights.
8 Automated speed enforcement (plus more red light cameras) Difficulty gauge: Very challenging Impact: City-changing Automatic speed enforcement is another bureaucratic mess, requiring a change in state law that would allow California cities to set up automatic traffic ticketing near the city’s most dangerous intersections. (It was last defeated in 2018.) But this one seems to align with the times. Not just the pandemic, but the Black Lives Matter protest movement and our daily dose of disturbing statistics on people of color being targeted during traffic stops. Automated speed enforcement, and the red light cameras already in place, remove police and implicit racial bias. Activists and transit planners seem to believe that this move, more than any other, could end up saving lives in the Tenderloin, Chinatown and other places where the city’s most vulnerable citizens live. “What we’re talking about is a public health crisis, and I think people forget about that,” WalkSF’s Jodie Medeiros said. “(These) are
not victimless crimes. It’s mostly children, it’s mostly seniors in lowincome neighborhoods.”
9 Bay Bridge bike and pedestrian lane Difficulty gauge: Very challenging Impact: Considerable A Bay Bridge bike and pedestrian lane to connect S.F. and Oakland isn’t going to happen without public support. Like Beaman, Wiedenmeier believes that army is being built right now. “Not a day goes by that I don’t get two or three text messages or emails or messages about where to find a bike, if we have resources available,” Wiedenmeier said. Online classes are growing, and the group’s Bike It Forward program gets refurbished bikes in the hands of first-timers. “And that,” Wiedenmeier says, “is what’s going to build momentum for some of these bigger projects.” It will take support, up to the governor, for a project the size of a Bay Bridge bike lane, which would require adding a bike platform adjacent to the bridge or repurposing one of the five lanes. And there’s definitely no money for it today. But the city is filled with lasting infrastructure that looked impossible during the Great Depression, immediately followed by some of the most ambitious change in the city’s history.
The Central Subway, a stubby 1.7-mile Muni Metro track from Chinatown to Fourth and King streets, will be more than three years behind schedule if it isn’t delayed (yet again) before its endof-2021 planned opening. But that doesn’t mean we should stop. It just means we should be more efficient, with better oversight and a priority of utility over grandeur. John Oram points to the Barcelona model, where subway stops are quickly being added at a fraction of the cost of San Francisco’s network. Turn that tunnel boring machine on and never turn it off again. “Tunnels are pretty cheap; it’s the stations that cost so much money,” he says. “You just put an escalator in; you drop a big station in a tube. ... It doesn’t need to be this massive box, which gets really expensive.” Fisherman’s Wharf seems like the next logical spot for the Central Subway, then extending out to the Marina District and Presidio. But the we-can-die-happy-now moment will be a subway along Geary Boulevard, most realistically as a line extending off the second BART tube. Promised for more than 100 years, a Geary subway would fix one of the city’s biggest people-moving problems, forever being triaged by the overworked 38 Geary bus line.
@ Oslo model car-free city center Difficulty gauge: Science fiction Impact: Revolutionary As other items on this checklist show promise, we’ll be ready for the big dream: limiting vehicles from a large portion of downtown and rebooting it for bicyclists, walkers and transit. Oslo is doing this right now, making only small compromises for the goal of a car-free utopia. Years from now, with enough momentum, turning busy downtown streets into multi-use bike pathways, benches and patio seating may seem no more crazy than tearing down the double-decker freeway next to the Ferry Building. There was a time that the Golden Gate Bridge looked like science fiction too. The ferry companies took out ads in The Chronicle, claiming spanning a bridge between San Francisco and the Marin Headlands would harm tourism, or that it would be bombed and trap our Navy fleet. We’re starting small, at the street level, right now. If we open our minds to the potential of the city, anything seems possible.
Peter Hartlaub is The San Francisco Chronicle’s culture critic. Email: phartlaub@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @PeterHartlaub
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THE CITY
F E AS I B I L I T Y RAT I N G Red light: Kuth and Ranieri are optimistic realists. That’s what makes their micro-hood concept so intriguing: it’s technically feasible. Logistically, however, they acknowledge that it’s a political nonstarter in San Francisco.
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TH IS B U ILDING A ND B LO CK Kuth and Ranieri chose this pocket of downtown for its existing structures: the soon-to-be-empty headquarters of PG&E and other pre-war office buildings whose designs facilitate conversions better than modern high-rise towers.
THE MICRO-HOOD REDESIGN APA RT M E N TS What is currently a set of interconnected office buildings on Market Street would be converted into about 275 apartments. The facade on Market Street would remain, but Kuth and Ranieri would carve away pieces of the interior to make way for balconies that open to the streets below — “so the buildings aren’t so hermetic,” Ranieri says. “You retain the history of the place, but internally, it’s a whole new world,” Kuth says.
By Gregory Thomas
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The remainder of this building would be converted into flexible office space — potentially available to micro-hood residents for remote work — as well as a vertical farm. Fruits and vegetables would grow on balconies installed on the west-facing side of the building and flow into the wetlands at the building’s base. Apart from producing food for residents, “that natural ecology would bring back birdlife to the central parts of the city,” Kuth said.
This office building on Mission Street has been outfitted with solar panels and redesigned as a three-dimensional photovoltaic tower to maximize its sun-facing surface area. Inside would be a small-scale power plant, based on cutting-edge research at MIT, Kuth says, which would power the whole micro-hood. “This doesn’t exist yet, but they would be 20 times more powerful than a standard photovoltaic array,” he says.
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Working from their kitchen table the past four months, Elizabeth Ranieri and Byron Kuth got to roughing out napkin sketches of lofty designs that might serve the needs of one of the country’s densest cities, potentially forever changed by coronavirus. ¶ They looked over San Francisco’s perpetually beleaguered downtown corridor and saw an area ripe for redevelopment. “As we come out of this pandemic, we’ll have changed how we live, how we work,” said Ranieri, design principal at Kuth Ranieri Architects, headquartered in North Beach. Companies are already mulling how to incorporate social distancing, new cleanliness protocols, workspace redesigns and improved ventilation into their offices. But Ranieri and her husband and business partner, Byron Kuth, are thinking bigger. What if you took two blocks of office towers in the Financial District, closed off traffic between them and turned the street into a park? What if you converted one block to apartment housing and the other to green energy infrastructure, wastewater treatment and vertical agriculture? You’d have a self-contained, energy-independent community of the future. Ranieri and Kuth call it a micro-hood. The two have been proposing radical, speculative infrastructure concepts for two decades as a means of questioning the status quo of 21st century urban planning. Some of their proposals border on science fiction. In 2009, for example, they rolled out a “vertical wetlands” design that would transform and celebrate wastewater treatment in Mission Creek. The pair work on real, practical projects too. They helped design the new Harvey Milk Terminal (Terminal 1) at SFO, which wrapped last year. The coronavirus pandemic got them thinking about how the city might change, looking ahead. They zoomed in on a two-block area between Mission, Market, Beale and Main streets. The site contains the soon-to-be-vacated 32-story office headquarters of PG&E, built circa 1925, as well as other pre-war office buildings whose structures lend themselves to feasible conversions. “It’s up to us as designers to really understand how to repurpose these buildings, to evolve the downtown into a new neighborhood ecology,” Ranieri said. The guiding theory of Ranieri’s and Kuth’s micro-hood concept goes like this: With COVID-19 amplifying the health imperatives of personal space, and shelter-in-place proving that many companies can operate on full-time remote staffs, we’ll have a permanent surplus of vacant office space in downtown high-rises. It’d be only natural then to put that space to new use — perhaps serving San Francisco’s gaping need for low-cost housing and injecting lifeblood into the
The guiding theory of the micro-hood concept goes like this: With COVID-19 and shelter-inplace proving that many companies can operate on full-time remote staffs, we’ll have a permanent surplus of vacant office space in downtown high-rises.
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city’s urban core. Any new project should at least in part address our uncertain climate future by incorporating green features and amenities. Plus a selfsufficient community, they reason, may be better equipped to weather an earthquake or economic downturn. Their micro-hood design “could replicate that small-town model within the density of the city,” Kuth said. “If you could take on two blocks and it’s successful, that concept could proliferate through downtown,” Ranieri says. Bringing micro-hoods to fruition would require zoning and policy rewrites sure to be rejected by city planners and voters. But that’s not the point, Kuth and Ranieri say. This is a thought exercise in better living. However, downtown San Francisco is already changing. Private vehicles were barred from Market Street in January — part of the city’s plan to decongest the thoroughfare and make it more pedestrian-friendly. Proposals for glimmering skyscrapers and multi-use revitalizations — many of which integrate residential, office, retail, hotel lodging, parks and plazas — are flowing; some have already broken ground. And then there is the sinking trajectory of office-space occupancy during the coronavirus pandemic. The overall vacancy rate of the city’s office space was 8.8% in May — already 5.4% above what it was at the end of 2019, according to new figures from real estate firm Cushman and Wakefield. Companies with downtown offices aren’t rushing workers back. Wells Fargo and Google have only begun reintroducing small numbers of employees into their spaces, and the newly minted Salesforce Tower development, which supports 9,000 office workers, has yet to issue a timeline for reopening. (When it does open, there will be temperature scans, mask requirements, social distancing, sanitizer stations and more.) All of this gestures toward a future that deemphasizes centralized office districts, alleviates rush-hour commute crushes and liberates whitecollar workers from the 9-5 schedule. In that scenario, the once-bustling streets and busy high-rises of downtown San Francisco might look more like blank canvases.
Do you want to see micro-hoods in SF? Write us at culture@ sfchronicle.com
Gregory Thomas is The Chronicle’s editor of lifestyle and outdoor. Email: gthomas@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @GregRThomas
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Natatorium
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C OU RT Y AR D The courtyard space between the two buildings would be “re-curated” as an open park, Kuth says. He and Ranieri envision gardens, walkways, patio seating and potentially an outdoor performance venue. “It’s a public park, but it happens to be inside the block,” Ranieri says.
WASTEWATER TREA TMENT/ VERTICAL AN D H O RIZO NTAL WETLANDS Ranieri and Kuth believe that the city’s wastewater treatment system, which uses the same set of pipes to transfer both stormwater runoff and sewage, is overtaxed and that wastewater processing should be decentralized. Here, they incorporate a corner of the micro-hood to wetlands to assist with an on-site water filtration system. “We need to have resilient cities,” Kuth said. “It’d be smart to set up zones that have their own water treatment and energy.”
Renderings: Courtesy Kuth Ranieri Architects©; photo: Michael Short / Special to The Chronicle 2019; map: Tam Duong Jr. / The Chronicle
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J8 | Sunday, July 12, 2020 | SFChronicle.com
SFChronicle.com | Sunday, July 12, 2020 |
J9
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THE CITY
OUTLOOK METER Cautiously optimistic: City leaders have long ignored the Tenderloin, but now San Francisco’s most diverse neighborhood has the city’s attention, and advocates are hopeful for its future.
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REVERSING NEGLECT: W ITH CARE , W E CA N REV IV E THE T ENDER LOIN By Ryan Kost
F
For years the park on the corner of Turk and Hyde streets had gone mostly unnoticed by the city. Maybe it was the size; the park (more of a playground) takes up less than a quarter acre of San Francisco’s nearly 50 square miles. Or maybe it was the location — right at the center of the Tenderloin.
Finally, in 2012, the park was earmarked as a priority renovation under the city’s “Let’s Play SF” bond. Eight years and $1.7 million later, the Turk-Hyde Mini Park was scheduled to reopen on March 2, 2020. Pratibha Tekkey remembers that date because she made sure to plan her flight to India for the day after the grand reopening. She didn’t want to miss seeing kids fly down the new slide, dangle from the lime-green jungle gym and run across the fresh-laid astroturf. The park didn’t get any bigger after renovations, but in the Tenderloin, the city’s most diverse and often most neglected neighborhood, small things matter. They add up. Tekkey is a community organizer in the Tenderloin and the director of community organizing for the Central City SRO
Collaborative. For her and for others, this small park was one in a string of recent victories. There was the food hall set to take over the long-vacant post office on Hyde Street and the increase in power washing the streets and sidewalks. A market-rate housing project was about to break ground on the neighborhood’s edge, and the Tenderloin Merchants Association had recently formed. “We felt like things were coming together. You know? Like things are happening. Slowly things are changing, improving for the better,” Tekkey says. “But then the pandemic happened.” Two weeks after the park opened, the Bay Area began to shelter in place, the playground closed and the number of tents on Tenderloin sidewalks — an imperfect but telling met-
ric of the neighborhood’s health — more than doubled. The pandemic had pushed the Tenderloin to a breaking point. Those numbers have since dropped considerably, but only after significant neighborhood lobbying that culminated with UC Hastings College of the Law joining five other plaintiffs to sue the city over the neighborhood’s condition. “We’re turning a corner,” says Matt Haney, the San Francisco supervisor who represents the Tenderloin. “I took a walk around the neighborhood this morning and, in many ways, there’s a lot that I saw that’s more positive and hopeful than I’ve seen here in a long time.” Neighborhood advocates are realistic about this setback and the years of successes seemingly washed away overnight.
But, some say, there’s also room for cautious optimism. This moment may be a catalyst for change. Housing the houseless, taking care of the neighborhood’s most vulnerable — those are just the first steps toward imagining a revived Tenderloin. New trash cans, a farmers’ market, corner stores full of produce, revived playgrounds, neighborhood events, temporary dog runs — small things other areas take for granted — can lead to a neighborhood in bloom, advocates say. Residents aren’t looking to change the character of the Tenderloin, says Katie Conry, director of the Tenderloin Museum. “What a lot of people in the neighborhood have been working to do is maintain the Tenderloin as a workingclass neighborhood, with the most low-income housing in the entire city.” They’ve been working for a “thriving neighborhood” where people can get services and “where everyone feels welcome and safe. “That’s the dream.”
***
For the first half of the 1900s, the Tenderloin was one of San Francisco’s most vibrant neighborhoods. It was full of vice, sure, but it was also the place to go on a night out. The streets brimmed with theaters and restaurants and bars. Then, around the late 1950s, the city cracked down on the neighborhood’s underground gambling economy and paved over the streetcar lines that ran through it. The Tenderloin was cut off and abandoned, and yet it found a new purpose. This abandoned neighborhood would offer itself to those who were also forgotten or alone, those who had just moved to San Francisco in search of a home and those who had run out of places to turn. The Tenderloin became a neighborhood of “first access and last resort,” as Curtis Bradford, a neighborhood activist, puts it. In 1966, two years before New York City’s Stonewall Riots, queer people in San
Francisco fought back against police at a latenight diner called Compton’s Cafeteria. A labor movement grew in the Tenderloin, and an affordable housing movement, too. In the 1980s, neighborhood activists pushed through historic policies to fight gentrification, prevent high-rises and protect the Tenderloin’s singleroom-occupancy hotels. To this day, those efforts remain a defining success. Pratibha Tekkey, the organizer, estimates that 40% to 50% of the neighborhood’s units are rent controlled. Others put the percentage of below-market-rate housing higher. This history has meant a neighborhood full of artists and activists and immigrants and families (the Tenderloin is home to more children per capita than any other). This history has built a home for the poor and disabled and marginalized. “It’s the soul of San Francisco,” says Fernando Pujals, the director of communications for the Tenderloin Community Benefit District. “The values that San Francisco wants to display or present are rooted in the Tenderloin. “When you think of Saint Francis, the patron saint of the city, and you think of caring for others and nurturing others, you think of the work that so many do every day in the Tenderloin.” None of this is meant to romanticize the Tenderloin in its current state. None of this is meant to excuse the open-air drug trade, or the hundreds living on the street in the city with the highest density of billionaires in the world. None of this is meant to paper over the fact that Ashok Thapa, the owner of Fish Tail Market on Turk Street, gets fewer customers because his doorstep offers a better home to the homeless than the city traditionally has, or that Marlene Ku is afraid to let her children play outside. Four years ago, Marlene Ku came to San Francisco with her child to be with
her husband. He’d been living in San Francisco for 20 years. They chose the Tenderloin for the same reason many others do: Rent was too high anywhere else. What she loves most about the neighborhood is that she can go to a corner store and find pieces of her home in Mexico. But that’s not enough, she says. She speaks in Spanish as she talks about wanting her children — Emma, 12, and now there’s a sibling, Lynel, 2 — to have “the freedom to play openly without worry.” “Please think,” Ku says, as Lynel cries in the background, “about the families. The children deserve a place where they can play freely with each other.” If she could afford it, she says, she would move. The solutions, neighborhood advocates say, are not complicated or unattainable. Often, they’re obvious, or even already unfolding. Del Seymour, a longtime resident known as the unofficial mayor of the Tenderloin, points to the dozens of corner liquor stores that could offer more than sugary treats and booze. Already the Tenderloin Healthy Store Coalition has helped a handful of bodegas convert. Fresh produce takes the place of potato chips and soda. The city could support their efforts. Most neighborhoods have a decades-long, citysanctioned plan. The Tenderloin does not. But the Tenderloin People’s Congress (of which Curtis Bradford is co-chair) could help with that. They’ve already drawn a list of priorities, including public restrooms, a neighborhood flea market and a neighborhood improvement fund. Katie Conry, of the Tenderloin Museum, is pushing for more activations — community arts programs, performances, events — anything to knit the community together, to offer it space to exist and thrive. She already has a block party series set for August in partnership with the Tenderloin Community
Above left: Cesar Arqueta, 3, climbs up the slide as he plays at the new Turk-Hyde Mini Park in the Tenderloin on March 5. Two weeks after it opened, the playground — considered one of the recent positive developments in the neighborhood — was closed as shelter-in-place began. Top right: In 2015, Daldas Grocery began ramping up the sale of fresh produce as part of the city’s Healthy Corner Store program. Greater access to healthy groceries is one of the changes to the neighborhood that residents of the Tenderloin hope will continue when the pandemic ends. Above right: Tents line a McAllister Street sidewalk on the same block as UC Hastings College of the Law on June 11. A push to reduce the number of tents began to show results only after significant neighborhood lobbying culminated in Hastings joining five other plaintiffs in suing the city over the neighborhood’s condition.
TELL US Have questions about the Bay Area’s future? Email: culture@sfchronicle.com
Benefit District and Livable Cities. Streets will close to cars and open to residents for art exhibitions and safe entertainment. Fernando Pujals, of the benefit district, wants to draw youth into planning decisions and revive its lost teen center. Pratibha Tekkey dreams of open spaces, an alley that becomes a dog run, a parking lot that becomes a farmers’ market. Other neighborhoods shut down streets all the time, she says. Why not the Tenderloin? Kasy Asberry, of Demonstration Gardens, has spent a decade greening the neighborhood. She’s worked with residents to plant lemon trees on rooftops and the slightest pieces of earth. She imagines vertical gardens scaling walls and patio beds. “We really think the Tenderloin can become the Garden District of San Francisco,” she says. “We want to help people garden wherever they can. Any little corner.” In the midst of a pandemic, it’s hard to imagine feeling hopeful for a neighborhood that’s been undervalued for decades. And yet, Asberry and others do. “It’s a crazy time to be hopeful,” she says. “But I absolutely feel very hopeful because there are signs of resilience everywhere.” In January, the city counted 103 tents in the Tenderloin. By June 5 there were more than 415. A little more than a month later — after community activism and the lawsuit — the number is somewhere around 130. More than 400 people, Haney says, have been given homes off the streets. Clear sidewalks. Splashes of green against the gray. Markets full of fresh food. A renovated playground on the corner of Turk and Hyde. All small things. But in the Tenderloin, small things add up. In the Tenderloin, small things offer a future.
Your fine art, jewelry, fashions, accessories, or high-end furniture could appear in Finds too. Just call Kathy Castle at 415.777.7258 to advertise.
To Advertise in Finds Call Kathy Castle: 415.777.7258
To Advertise in Finds Call Kathy Castle: 415.777.7258
hIghlIghT your proDuCT IN FINDS Call Kathy Castle at 415.777.7258 to advertise your fine art, jewelry, fashions, accessories, or high-end furniture here.
To Advertise in FINDS Call Kathy Castle: 415.777.7258
Ryan Kost is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: rkost@sfchronicle.com. Twitter: @RyanKost To Advertise in FINDS Call Kathy Castle: 415.777.7258
J10 | Sunday, July 12, 2020 | SFChronicle.com
THE CITY
A BIT OF FICTION: ‘I’M WITH MUNI — H O W CA N I HELP?’ By Annalee Newitz
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Nothing could ever change the 38Geary. Not two years of ’rona. Not a whole year of uprisings against the acting interim U.S. president. The 38 stayed true to itself. Outsize and awkward, its bendy waist looking like a tattered accordion between cars, the bus prowled one of the city’s widest streets. Starting South of Market, it charged through the Tenderloin and the Richmond — until its square, ungainly ass made it all the way out to Ocean Beach. It was like a force of nature. Cruz couldn’t have asked for a better route during her first tour of duty as a Muni Social Support Specialist. It was 6 a.m. on a moody October morning when she climbed on board at Union Square, shedding her jacket to reveal the regulation Muni red tie and blue shirt. Cruz was tall and wiry, which her mother always said came from the Haitian side of the family. On the Mayan side, everybody was short. Rasheed was her driving partner today, which was a stroke of luck. They’d been friends back at Mission High, so she didn’t need to do a long introduction. He was still the same guy with a goofy smile she remembered from American Democracy class, though he’d grown his hair out into a natural look that was pretty hot. Despite Rasheed’s grin and her weeks of training, Cruz had to admit she was a little nervous. “It’s my first day, so go easy on me.” He shrugged. “Never know what’s going to happen. Might be one of those days when you need 10 edibles after work. Might be quiet.” Then he closed the door and her shift started. Outside, the sky was starting to glow a faint blue around shreds of cloud. Cruz could tell it was going to be a gorgeous sunrise after the rain last night. She walked up and down the aisle, getting her bearings, trying to meet everyone’s eyes with a smile. Her first job was to identify anyone who needed help, which wasn’t very hard. You could tell who rode the bus all day because it was the only safe, dry place they had; you knew who was too drunk to be around people; and it was usually pretty obvious when someone was having a mental health crisis. The hard part was what came next: getting some help for the Person In Need, or PIN for short. That’s what made Cruz a new kind of Muni worker. Of course, individual drivers did try to help riders in distress. But that wasn’t sustainable; it was impossible to do constant interventions and keep to a bus schedule at the same time. Now, Cruz and the other Muni Social Support Specialists were changing all that. At this hour, there were only about 10 people on the bus, mostly sleepy commuters getting off the night shift. But there was one woman she flagged immediately as a potential PIN. She was an elder, white hair stuck to her pale forehead, with a tattered raincoat hanging off one shoulder and three canvas bags slumped at her feet. As Cruz passed her seat, the woman began talking and gesturing. “They are all dogs,” she said. Her voice got louder. “They are dogs and killers!” Surreptitiously, Cruz checked to see whether the PIN had an earbud. Negative. She was talking to herself. It wasn’t necessarily a sign of distress. Lots of people talk to themselves without realizing it. Still, Cruz made a mental note to keep an eye on the woman, looking for signs of escalation. Part of her
The Chronicle photo illustration
She walked up and down the aisle, getting her bearings, trying to meet everyone’s eyes with a smile. Her first job was to identify anyone who needed help, which wasn’t very hard.
AB OU T THE AU T H O R Annalee Newitz is a Bay Area writer whose latest book, “The Future of Another Timeline,” was released last year.
training involved mental health interventions, and the rule was to leave people alone unless they were overwhelmingly disruptive — or a danger to themselves or others. She took a seat behind the potential PIN, trying to beam a chill vibe directly into her brain. They reached Gough without incident and Cruz started to relax. It felt good to have a job again. Supposedly 2020 had been the worst year ever to graduate from college, but for Cruz it hadn’t been so bad. With her degree in data science, she managed to land full-time employment as a contact tracer. While her friends struggled to find work, she spent her two pandemic years on the phone at her mom’s house in the Mission, talking to people who were having complete meltdowns. Those days were over. Now that you could buy personalized vaccine patches printed with images of your favorite K-pop bands, contact tracing sounded positively quaint. Cruz got laid off in 2022, just as most of her college friends were finally finding jobs. After a depressing interview at Facebook for a gig analyzing “truthiness in posting,” she saw one of those clip-art ads on a 14-Mission bus stop. JOIN OUR TEAM! SEEKING SOCIAL SUPPORT STAFF FOR MUNI RIDEALONGS! It sounded intriguing. A QR code on the poster took her to a shabby government-made website for “New Muni,” announcing post-rona bus routes, and describing how the city was planting a garden path along the old J-Church tracks. She had to swipe through several menus before she found job listings. According to the “SFMTA Vision Statement,” the transit agency was one of several city departments that received funding to provide social services after San Francisco rebooted the Police Department in 2021. Now they needed people who could help distressed transit riders find the resources they needed. One thing Cruz had learned from her contact tracing days was that she was really good at calming people down and helping them get the resources they needed — even when it seemed like there were no resources to be had. She impressed the Muni recruiter by listing the location of every San Francisco homeless shelter and free clinic from memory. To be fair, there weren’t enough of them to make memorizing their addresses much of a challenge. And today she was here, trying to help people on the 38-Geary. A Black woman in a nurse’s uniform got on the bus at Masonic, and the PIN in front of Cruz got agitated. “Your dog is killing me!” she screamed. “It almost bit my face!” Ignoring her, the nurse walked to the back of the bus and sat down with a sigh. The PIN was just getting started, though. She screamed again. “Call off your dogs!” A few of the sleepy commuters woke up, and one moved to a seat farther from the PIN. The woman continued to yell about dog attacks. This was officially a disturbance. Cruz sat down next to the PIN and tried to meet her eyes. Looking into people’s faces sometimes helped to orient them. No luck. The woman stared straight ahead, shaking. “Do you see the blood? Do you?” Gently, Cruz put her hand on the PIN’s arm. The distressed woman’s raincoat had fallen off, revealing that she was wearing nothing but a sleeveless dress on this cold fall morning. “Hey, I’m with Muni Social Support,” Cruz said. “Do you need some help? We can find you a warm meal or a place to sleep tonight. Or we can get you a doctor if you are hurt.” The woman turned to Cruz, face distorted by rage or confusion
— maybe both. She glared at Cruz’s hand, brown against her white bicep. Cruz thought about how the PIN had started really losing it when the Black nurse got on board. Was this going to become a thing? Was this woman going to pull a Karen? She braced herself. After a moment, the woman’s face cleared. “Is that you, honey?” she asked. “Sonia? Are you back from the hospital?” Cruz felt a twinge of sadness. So many people had lost their loved ones in the second wave. People called it the Millennial Spike because it hit 30-somethings the hardest. And that left a lot of elders on the street, because their kids weren’t there to pay for care facilities anymore. She met the woman’s eyes finally. “I’m not Sonia — I’m Cruz. What’s your name?” The woman looked at her blankly for a second. “Where’s Sonia?” “I don’t know. Can you tell me your name? I’d like to get you some help.” “Heather Green. That dog — that dog bit me.” Cruz took Heather though a series of questions, slow and easy, trying to figure out where she was living and whether she had someone to take care of her. Without doing a lookup on her ID, it was hard to say for sure whether Heather was homeless. But she did have a nasty wound on her other arm that was seeping through the newspapers she’d wrapped around it. Definitely one for the ER. Muni Social Support was part of a new network of social service providers in San Francisco, which meant they had a slightly clunky app for interagency business. Cruz swiped through it, typing in what she knew about Heather to get this PIN a slot at the CPMC hospital on Van Ness. By the time Cruz had Heather’s case all sorted in the system, they were zipping back up Geary, past Japantown. At the Van Ness stop, she handed Heather off to a guy from the San Francisco Street Team — another social support group that the Board of Supervisors had spun up from the old police budget. The Street Team guy glanced at the app on his phone, and looked up brightly at them. “Hi Heather — I’m Quifan! You can call me Ken if that’s easier.” One of the main benefits of the app was that everybody in the chain of support knew the PIN’s name in advance, which generally made the person in crisis feel a lot safer. Cruz helped Heather down the front stairs of the bus, and handed her three bags to Quifan. “He’s going to take you to the hospital.” “Will you tell Sonia where I am?” “I will if I see her, Heather.” Rasheed nodded at Quifan and Cruz from behind the wheel. “Thanks for handling that.” Cruz climbed back on the bus, where a person with purple hair and a cane propped between their knees smiled at her. “I’ve never seen anyone do that before. You’re with Muni?” “Yes I am. I’m part of the new social services team.” The person shook their head wonderingly. “I’ve always liked Muni, but that was above and beyond. Really cool.” It was almost 7 a.m., and the sky was turning blue and gold. Cruz walked back up the aisle, nodding at the passengers. Suddenly, she could feel the light hitting the graffiti-covered windows all the way inside the atomic structures of her cells. She’d actually helped somebody today. Maybe it wasn’t a permanent fix. Maybe Heather had a hard road ahead. But she wasn’t going to scream on the bus, in pain, waiting for someone to hear her. Somebody had finally heard.